The following relates generally to wireless communication, and more specifically to communications in a machine-to-machine (M2M) wireless wide area network (WAN). Wireless communications systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, sensor data, tracking data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems.
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communications system may include a number of base stations, each simultaneously supporting communication for multiple devices. In some examples, these devices may be sensors and/or meters configured to collect data and transmit this data to an end server via a base station. These sensors and/or meters may be referred to as M2M devices. Communications between M2M devices and a base station may occur on forward and reverse links. Each base station has a coverage range, which may be referred to as the coverage area of the cell. An M2M device may transmit data to a base station on the reverse link. The base station may transmit data to the M2M device on the forward link.
When the base station successfully decodes data received on the reverse link, the base station may transmit an acknowledgment (ACK) message on the forward link to notify the M2M device that the data has been successfully received and decoded. Similarly, upon successfully receiving and decoding data on the forward link, the M2M device may be required to transmit an ACK message on the reverse link.
A single base station may communicate with a multitude of M2M devices. Transmitting an ACK message from each M2M device requires valuable bandwidth of the reverse link. In addition, power and other resources of the M2M device are needed in order to transmit an ACK message back to the base station on the reverse link. The transmission of ACK messages on the reverse link may result in an inefficient use of the power supply of M2M devices.